In the US, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has what it calls a Going Dark problem.

As the FBI has been telling it for the past few years, the agency is unable to tap the latest generation of Internet communications venues - at least, not always easily or quickly - as it seeks to eavesdrop on terrorists, child pornographers, human traffickers, arms traffickers, drug dealers or other criminals.

A government task force is now preparing legislation that would fix all that by putting the screws on companies such as Facebook and Google, forcing them to enable law enforcement to intercept communications in real time, according to The Washington Post.

CALEA is a wiretapping law passed under President Bill Clinton that requires telecom service providers and equipment providers to design or modify their products, facilities and services to have surveillance capabilities built in from the ground up so that Feds can monitor all telephone, broadband Internet, and VoIP traffic in real time.

I've already written about the guy who got a new trial because a virus ate his court records. Here's someone who will have to redo his thesis research because someone stole his only copy of the data. Remember the rule: no one ever wants backups, but everyone always wants restores.

I have no idea if that image is real or not, but I've been hearing such stories for at least two decades.

Mozilla has confirmed that it has sent a cease and desist letter to Gamma International, makers of the FinFisher spyware. A report by the University of Toronto Citizen Lab on the global spread of Gamma's FinFisher spyware revealed that the FinSpy component deployed on victims' systems masquerades as Mozilla Firefox. Binaries report themselves as "Firefox.exe" and carry properties that are associated with Firefox including version numbers and copyright and trademark claims that refer to "Firefox and Mozilla developers". Mozilla also notes that an expert user examining the code of Gamma's spyware would find a verbatim copy of the assembly manifest from Firefox software.

Gamma's use of the "brand and trademarks to lie and mislead" does not affect Firefox itself; the use of the Firefox branding and properties is "entirely separate" from the Firefox code and is just one of the methods that FinFisher uses to avoid detection. Mozilla's Alex Fowler, who leads on privacy and public policy for the organisation, says that this deception is specifically trading on Mozilla's reputation of being trustworthy - in 2012, for example, Mozilla was named "Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy" in a Ponemon Institute study (PDF).

The US Department of Labor's website has been hacked and malicious code stuck behind the scenes, security tools firm AlienVault says.

Since yesterday, the DoL site has been serving out malicious code that installs malware on unsuspecting users' computers, AlienVault's labs director Jaime Blasco told The Register.

The DoL said that it was working on the problem, but had no other comment on the hack.

Browsers execute a script from a malicious server when folks visit the affected site, the DoL's Site Exposure Matrices microsite. The infected script collects information including Flash versions, PDF plugins and MS Office versions from users' systems. Captured data is then uploaded to the hackers' server, AlienVault discovered.

The malware also checks if the target's system is running antivirus programs like McAfee, AVG or Sophos. If it detects the popular Bitdefender free anti-virus program, the malware will try to deactivate the AV suite.

"Some of the techniques used in this attack are very similar to the ones we identified a few months ago in an attack against a Thailand NGO website," Blasco said in a blog post.

Malware developers continue to clone SourceForge Web sites that appear to offer the source code for popular gaming software but are actually peddling malicious code tied to the ZeroAccess Trojan.

Julien Sobrier, a security researcher for San Jose-based cloud security provider Zscaler, on Tuesday outlined several more malicious versions of the popular file-sharing sites, some of which appeared to offer modification code for Minecraft (http: //sourceforgeestonia.net/minecraft_xray_texture_pack.exe) and source code for Airport Firefighter Simulator (http: //sourceforgeecuador.net/airport_firefighter_simulator.exe ) before they were taken offline.

Sobrier earlier this month discovered similar malware on a fake version of sourceforgechile.net. This past week, in addition to the bogus sites appearing to come from Estonia and Ecuador, fake Web sites were registered in the United States for sourceforgegrenada.net,sourceforgepalau.net, sourceforgeindiana.net, sourceforgemorocco.net, sourceforgemyanmar.net and sourceforgeyemen.net.

After a series of attacks against accounts maintained by media companies, Twitter has issued a memo on security best practices and encouraged them to remain vigilant. The warning comes after several high-profile accounts were targeted by a Pro-Syria activist group, including one attack that impacted Wall Street.

Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has claimed responsibility for last month's attacks, including those that targeted three CBS News accounts. The (SEA) claimed responsibility for the messages posted on the feeds for 60 Minutes, 48 Hours and CBS Denver, which included comments that President Obama was "shamelessly in bed with Al-Qaeda" and that the CIA was arming Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria.

Shortly after those hacks, the SEA targeted the Twitter account used by the Associated Press, reporting that there were explosions at the White House, and that President Obama was injured. As the fake news alert gained traction online, Wall Street suffered when the DOW took a 130 dip and the S&P dropped 12 points.

"What do Apple, AT&T, Myspace, Verizon and Yahoo! have in common? Little regard for protecting their customers from governmental abuse of power."

With great storage comes great responsibility The Electronic Frontier Foundation published their 3rd annual report (pdf) on online privacy and transparency on government access to your data. The EFF looked at 18 online companies and their policies across 6 criteria:

Once users become too familiar with a type of scam and stop falling for it, scammers tend to move on to new ones. But every now and then they go back to using old ones for a while in the hopes that new users haven't been told about them, and that old users forgot about them.

Hoax-Slayer has spotted an ongoing Facebook campaign that combines a well-known (but obviously still effective) lure and a trick that has been around for a good while, but not very lately.

The lure is a fake Facebook Profile Viewer app, and the scammers are impersonating the social network and are trying to convince users that they are now required to show them who has been viewing their profile: [Screenshot]

But in order to be allowed to install the app, the users are told they must generate an "age verification code." Unfortunately, the instructions lead to them sharing their Facebook authentication token with the scammers, who then misuse it to gain temporary access to the victims' accounts and use it to spread more of the same scam messages on Facebook.

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